Université de Strasbourg

Loren Hayes

Loren HayesDr. Loren Hayes is an Associate Professor in Behavioral Physiology in the Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He is also an Associate Researcher at P. Universidad Catolica de Chile and an adjunct professor at Universidad Austral de Chile. Dr. Hayes’ dissertation research with Dr. Nancy Solomon at Miami University (Ohio) focused on the reproductive benefits of alloparental care and mechanisms of parental and alloparental care of offspring by female prairie voles (Microtus ochrogaster). His current research program focuses on the evolutionary significance of rodent sociality and mating systems. He is also participating in a National Evolutionary Synthesis Center project aimed at determining how neural and physiological mechanisms influence animal sociality and cooperative behavior.

During his visit, dr. Hayes will work with dr. Carsten Schradin and others from the IPHC on developing an international network of scientists that do long-term studies on mammals worldwide, to increase the understanding of how environmental variation and evolutionary history contribute to intraspecific variation in mammalian social systems. Understanding social flexibility in animals will help us to understand our own social system. Important information on intraspecific variation in social systems will be added to a database of mammalian social systems (2539 species) that Dr. Hayes has compiled, which is an important tool to determine environmental predictors of intraspecific variation in social strategies.

France 2030